In The Dead by James Joyce, the protagonist, Gabriel, is described as a mild mannered man who typically avoids confrontations. Due to his demeanor, readers can see, through the use of a 3rd person omnipotent point of view, that Gabriel is internalizing all his feelings and reactions rather than physically expressing them. However, at the end of The Dead, we saw moments where Gabriel deviated from his laid-back personality, especially when it came to his wife admitting that she has feelings for someone else. His wife, Gretta, was previously seen intently listening to a piano piece. When Gabriel tried to figure out the significance of the song, Gretta admitted that it brought back memories of her time when she was in a relationship with someone else named Michael Furey. …show more content…
This caused Gabriel to feel “a dull anger began to gather again at the back of his mind…” (Joyce, 218-219) However, this anger soon dissipated as Gretta fell asleep and left Gabriel to wonder about this new information. Eventually, Gabriel arrived at his epiphany where no matter what he does, the past will always affect the present and the future and there’s nothing one can do about it. Gabriel can try to separate the past and the future but he soon realized that such border does not exist since he felt “His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.” (Joyce, 223) This epiphany was carefully structured because there been a build up to this epiphany when doing a close reading of certain sections of the